Shahana is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose research centres on urban policy, governance and political economy in India and globally, as well as broader questions of development and urbanization. She holds a PhD from Princeton University in Public Affairs, a Masters degree in International Development/ City Planning from MIT and a Bachelors degree in Architecture from the SPA, New Delhi.

Shahana has held research fellowships at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught courses in public policy, social science and planning programs at Oxford University, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. Prior to her doctoral studies, Shahana worked for several years at the United Nations Population Fund in New York as a programme coordinator, and later as a consultant with the World Bank’s Development Research Group.

With nearly two decades of experience in research and international development, Shahana has conducted research on local governance and community participation, urban infrastructure and services, including water and sanitation, metropolitan governance, development corridors and industrial policy in India, and the informal economy. More recent work focuses on digital transport platforms and the informalization of work, and refugee and migrant integration in cities. Shahana has published books, articles and policy papers on urban governance and political economy in Mumbai, informal settlements and housing markets and comparative decentralization in India and China.

Shahana is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and prior to joining WRI India, was a Fellow at the India Development Foundation, Gurugram. Shahana grew up in New Delhi and London, and enjoys reading, walking and thinking about research, occasionally all at the same time.

In WRI India, Shahana’s work will focus on building our research capacity across all programs, supporting/guiding research work by colleagues across programs and also undertaking some independent research.